However, we’re still not the best of local news sources just yet, ‘The Daily Echo’ has a Alexa ranking of 1,792 (11/12/12) in the UK and a global Alexa ranking of 56,651 (11/12/12). This means that we still have something to aim for, although we have beaten a local newspaper in terms of Alexa rankings there is still more that we can do as a team to improve our Alexa ranking even further. I believe this can be achieved by continuously promoting the site and asking other well respected sites to link ‘WINOL’ on their own site. I have seen a couple examples of this but I think that once a reporter has arranged an interview and filmed it they should contact the interviewee and tell them to watch ‘WINOL’ and promote the package which they appeared in.
I believe that the ‘WINOL’ website wouldn’t have achieved their Alexa rankings without every member of the team playing their part. For example, the features department on ‘WINOL’ has completely transformed this semester. This is proven by the fact that the website is now ‘sticky’. This means that the audience are drawn to the ‘WINOL’ site for the news and then remain on the site for an average of 6 minutes to read the features on the site.
‘WINOL’S feature department relentlessly promoted their features through social media such as ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’. The features team did this better than the news team. The news team should have been promoting their packages by enticing people to watch by using social media more. Although the news team did start to do this, it wasn’t until the end of the semester. The features department also used competition ideas as a way of capturing their audience’s attention. Promotion is something that the news team can only improve on in the next semester and I’m sure the result will be a further decrease in ‘WINOL’S overall Alexa ranking. I think maybe a preview of what to expect in the bulletin should be released on a Monday to act as an advert so that people will be left wanting to know more and will therefore definitely watch the bulletin.
The features department really put lots of focus onto what ‘WINOL’S audience want to read and because of this the fashion magazine ‘Absolute:ly’ was created. I think this has encouraged more of a female audience to be attracted to the site and therefore read the online features. The fashion magazine has given ‘WINOL’ features a feminine appeal. Currently, the balance is just right whereas before it was slightly more male orientated. There is a feature for everyone. For example there are car reviews, investigative journalism interviews and also fashion and gossip articles.
The features team are evidently capable of attracting an audience but just need to consistently produce more editions of their features. For example, the ‘caught on camera’ feature is a great way of attracting fellow students to the site yet only one of these was produced. Therefore, the audience who are attracted to this particular article may have seen it on the site for a few weeks and could give up checking for any more updates of that particular feature.
The news team have consistently produced a weekly bulletin of good quality news. The news team have pushed themselves to the limits in some weeks by producing the regular weekly bulletin as well as the 99 second news which went out live every working day of the week. I think the 99 second news was a fantastic success and proved that as students we are capable of working as a team to produce daily news snippets as well as a full length weekly bulletin.
The news team also took responsibility of submitting news articles onto the website. This was a challenge as reporters were forgetting to take their own photographs when they were out filming for their package. We all learnt that a written news story, even if it is a good story, won’t be published on the site if there isn’t a high quality photograph of a face or an action shot to go with the story. Therefore, pictures to go along with the written stories on the website can always be improved.
The change from Joomla to Wordpress on the site also temporarily confused things as this meant that we changed the website from being a tabloid layout to a broadsheet layout. Therefore, the style of the website changed dramatically and so the written stories had to be written to accommodate this change too. For example, the headline length and style of language used. At least one story a day was being published on the site but I still think that next semester there is chance to continue updating the website even more and there should be no limitations to who can write news stories for the site. For example, a member of the features team who is interested in the written stories should get involved too.
Every Monday we had a news meeting which enabled the reporters to discuss with the news editor their plans for their package and then the news editor could query the reporter’s ideas. I felt that this was a good way of communicating with the whole team as everyone chipped in with their opinions on each person’s story ideas and gave advice on how to make it more visual. I thought that the news meeting could be held earlier than it currently is just so that it doesn’t feel rushed and that every reporter can have the chance to discuss their story in length if need be.
This semester I was given the role of News Planner for ‘WINOL’. My first task of the year was to make sure that the WINOL Gmail account was up to date and clear of press releases from the previous year. I then asked this semester’s News Editor to put together a list of contacts of people that I should contact to ensure that I could provide the reporters with the latest local stories. The list of contacts included all of the local councils and all local political parties. I found that all press offices responded quickly to my email and agreed to send me the latest press releases in order to produce a regular, up to date, weekly bulletin. In some instances when I didn’t receive any press releases in a while I decided to phone up the press office to ask why we hadn’t been provided with any press releases.
By the third week of ‘WINOL’ a constant flow of press releases were being sent to the ‘WINOL’ Gmail inbox which I organised into different folders within the inbox which I labelled based on where they were sent from or what they are about E.g. I organised all the press releases from Hampshire Police into a folder called Hampshire Police. I continued to do this because I received positive feedback in the news meeting held on Mondays. The ‘WINOL’ reporters agreed that labelling the folders in the Gmail inbox according to where they’ve been sent from enabled them to browse through the press releases easily.
However, simply having the press releases filed away in the Gmail inbox still limited the ‘WINOL’ team’s accessibility to the press releases so with the help of Jason and Chris ‘The Week Ahead’ page on the website was created.
This meant that when I received a press release in the Gmail I then would summarise it in a sentence and write it on ‘The Week Ahead’ page so that the reporters could easily look on the website for news story ideas to see what was happening in Winchester and the surrounding areas. Then if they thought that one of the press releases sounded good they could log into the Gmail account and find the relevant press release to find out more details about the story.
This was a really good idea to incorporate my news planning onto the website as it meant that I could use ‘The Week Ahead’ as a way of talking about local events happening in Hampshire as well as including the latest University campus and Winchester Student Union news. This enabled my news planning to attract not only traffic from the ‘WINOL’ reporters but also from ‘University of Winchester’ students. I updated ‘The Week Ahead’ page every day with summaries of press releases which I believed to be news worthy. I arranged the summaries of the stories in date order, putting the most recent press releases at the top of the page and putting the sentences into sections stating the general topic of the press releases. E.g. The Council. Obviously not every press release which I received was able to be made into a news story but the majority of press releases were very useful.
The change from Joomla to Wordpress did affect my ‘Week Ahead’ page, but in a positive way because Wordpress enabled me to try out different layouts for ‘The Week Ahead’ which on Joomla I hadn’t been able to. The page can still be improved by making it look more attractive, there are so many press releases to manage on a daily basis that the page looks like a structured list. It would be a good idea to improve the layout of the page in the next semester.
I also used ‘Twitter’ to promote ‘The Week Ahead’ which didn’t work out to start with as I was only really appealing to our course members so didn’t really create more traffic to the site. WINDEALS was then created this was the idea that we would use ‘Twitter’ and ‘The Week Ahead’ page to advertise deals on our University campus at the shop and student union etc. This therefore is working as word spreads amongst the campus that our ‘WINOL’ site is the place to go to see what the latest deals are on campus.
I volunteered for it to be my responsibility to update the website on Sundays. Therefore, I had to use ‘The Week Ahead’ to find a decent news story and put it onto the website. I think in order to improve ‘The Week Ahead’ it needs to be moved into a section on the website’s front page as then visitors to the site will then have no choice but to read it. This is currently an on-going discussion as there is just so much that needs to be fitted onto the front page.
Overall what I’ve enjoyed the most has been the fact that I have been able to assist different people in a variety of jobs for ‘WINOL’ such as doing some filming for the feature’s student fashion show and helping out filming with the ‘WINOL’ reporters on a weekly basis.
